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Step Right Up, Folks. Behold What Amazes!

In his new book, "Extraordinary Exhibitions," Ricky Jay, master conjurer and historian of show business, has assembled such a congress of marvels, wonders, prodigies and anomalies as Barnum himself would have been proud to present. See Mathew Buchinger, who despite being born without hands or legs is a gifted calligraphist, magician, musician, swordsman and bowler. Behold Daniel Wildman, the equestrian apiarist, who rides standing on a horse while swarms of docile bees cover his face. Gasp as Giuseppe de Rossi separates a steer's head from its body, then rejoins them. Hear the enchanting voice of the Singing Mouse and match wits with Toby the Sapient Pig.

Also on display for your education and entertainment: an African hermaphrodite, a Pig-Faced Lady, the Giant Hungarian Schoolboy, an Enormous Head, a chess-playing automaton, rope-walkers, contortionists, German strongwomen, Lady and General Mite, Bertolotto's Industrious Fleas, a man who "eats fire faster than a person can eat bread," a woman who has been pregnant for six and a half years, and Mr. Williams, a West Indian magician known for "some very astonishing performances with walnuts." Along with assorted acts too wondrous.

Mr. Jay, of course, is an astonishing performer himself, even without walnuts. Widely recognized as the greatest present-day artist of close-up conjuring, card tricks and sleight of hand, he is also highly respected as a historian of show-business arcana, a researcher and archivist, an essayist and lecturer, an obsessive bibliomaniac and a fanatical collector of rare ephemera associated with some of the most remarkable acts that ever appeared on a stage or under a tent.

"Extraordinary Exhibitions," a coffee-table volume published by Quantuck Lane Press (which has reprinted "Jay's Journal of Anomalies" and published "Dice," a collaboration with the photographer Rosamond Purcell), showcases some of the most ephemeral ephemera in Mr. Jay's private collection: 76 handbills, playbills and posters touting performances by his beloved eccentrics. Cheaply printed and often crudely illustrated (or not at all), they range from tiny slips of paper thrust into the hands of 17th-century passers-by to a 33-by-50-inch broadsheet. The oldest is from 1618, and the most recent from 1898.

These are not what most people would think of as collectible artworks. In their time they had the currency of today's supermarket circulars. Which makes it "marvelous to think that these things have survived at all," Mr. Jay said in a recent telephone conversation from Washington, where he was performing a limited-run revival of his show "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants" (a solo show; the assistants are a deck of cards). "Particularly the small ones. You think, Who kept this thing around?"

Mr. Jay, who was initiated into the world of magic by his grandfather during his Brooklyn boyhood and by high school was seriously studying and collecting show-business history, has spent the last few decades scouring the planet for these items, resolutely haggling with cagey dealers and recalcitrant collectors. He says he treasures these throwaway slips of antique ballyhoo as objects, but even more for their historical clues.

"Often this is literally the only record we have of these performers, some tiny scrap of paper," he said. "Then you go on this wonderful path of trying to find out more about them. And occasionally you find out nothing beyond that sheet of paper. So you extrapolate and interpret a little to put it in historical context." Each item reproduced in "Extraordinary Exhibitions" is accompanied by explanatory text from Mr. Jay, sharing the fruits of his research.

Not that these items don't speak for themselves. Substituting verbosity for illustrations, they often describe an act at great length, if not with unimpeachable veracity. A 1726 broadsheet advertising Herr Buchinger bears 82 lines of rhyming couplets that begin:

See Gallants, wonder and behold

This German, of imperfect mold.

No feet, no leggs, no thighs, no hands,

Yet all the arts can do commands.

An 1835 broadside for Joice Heth, the supposedly 161-year-old African-American who was one of Barnum's earliest humbugs, covers two sides with a detailed (and almost wholly fanciful) account of her life.

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"You wonder about the literacy of the people involved, to read such pieces," Mr. Jay said. "Who are they being handed to, these lengthy, unillustrated bills rich with Latin phrases?"

Mr. Jay's fond admiration for "these incredibly crazy, disparaged entertainments" is unmistakable. One wonders what Faustian bargain he'd strike for a trip to 1829 to watch Signor Cappelli, "The Inimitable Tuscan," induce his Learned Cats to "beat a drum, turn a spit, grind knives, strike upon an anvil, roast coffee, ring bells ... with many other astonishing exercises." Or to catch a 1753 show by Duncan MacDonald, "The Scottish Equilibrist," who performed his celebrated slack-wire balancing act, Mr. Jay writes, "wearing a pair of large and cumbersome boots to which quart bottles were affixed, neck downward." Or for the chance to examine such technological sensations as Professor Faber's Wonderful Talking Machine of the 1840's, Mr. Haddock's lifelike Androides of the 1790's, or the 1872 Phantoscope projecting its ghostly "Carnival of Spirits."

Lacking a time machine, Mr. Jay said that just being able to view and study these once-common scraps of paper "really makes me happy."

"I know it sounds crazy, but life would be a lot tougher for me without guys like Duncan MacDonald hanging on the wall," he said. To share that feeling, Mr. Jay mounted an exhibition of these items at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this year and plans to take it on tour.

"I'm hoping this will be an inducement for museums to widen their forays into this field," he said. "I think the prejudice against printed paper is somewhat countered here by the genuine rarity of these things." His curatorial template is Barnum's American Museum, where the much-misunderstood impresario of the implausible genuinely sought to provide both entertainment and edification. "You absolutely got your money's worth," Mr. Jay said, "and you were unquestionably exposed to things intellectually that it's unlikely you would have come across. It's a viable model."

This brought the conversation back to Mathew Buchinger, promoted as the greatest magician of his time. Asked if he might be considered the Buchinger of the 21st century, Mr. Jay laughed.